Ingalls Wilder, Uttley, Kerr: Three Women Making Fiction from Hard Times - Part 2

Part 2

Woods and wild places figured large in the imaginations of Wilder and Uttley

In part 1, I wrote about how the need to make money during the Great Depression drove Laura Ingalls Wilder and Alison Uttley to the writing desk. Both turned their own childhoods into fiction, and found escape from hard times in doing so. Now I will look at the psychological impulses behind their work  - and the links with a third writer, Judith Kerr.

Alison Uttley began to write at a time when she was still a prosperous housewife, married to an engineer. Uttley may have wanted to supplement their income; she might even have suspected it was not a good idea to rely entirely on her husband as breadwinner (he’d had a past period out of work, which had forced the young couple and their new baby to move in with his parents. In 1930, his continuing mental health problems would lead to his suicide). Nevertheless, it seems likely there was something more that diverted her from tennis and housewifery and pushed her into hours at her writing desk. Uttley’s biographer suggests that it was her son’s absence at prep school, or a chance remark made by a former professor, that led to start writing seriously.

To me, what is more striking is the death of Uttley’s parents in 1926 and 1930. 

In her 1932 diary, Alison describes a dream, in which her father sits in the kitchen of their farm, Castle Top, looking at a copy of her book The Country Child. ‘“Has our Alice written this? What a deal of writing!” …  he looks very proud … “Hey it’s Castle Top right enough … Who’d have thought it?”’ The final loss of her childhood, caused by the death of her father, her mother’s removal from the family farm to an almshouse and subsequent death, is surely no coincidence in Alison’s urge to recreate the world of her childhood. Her book was a gift to her dead parents.

Uttley’s published diaries

Laura Ingalls Wilder lost her savings in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, but as significant may be the loss of her mother in 1924 and her older sister Mary in 1928. (Her beloved father had died in 1902.) For Laura, who had only once returned from Missouri to visit her birth family, the only way to reach them now was on paper. A year after her mother’s death she wrote to an aunt asking for stories of her mother from the days in Wisconsin ‘now it is too late ever to get them from her.’ Scraps of memoir turned into a sustained attempt to recapture her childhood on the page. Her first version, an adult novel Pioneer Girl, was completed in 1930. If her parents’ loss was the impetus, financial need meant that she did not give up when she failed to find a publisher: instead, her ambitious daughter Rose encouraged her to turn the rejected manuscript into a children’s book.

Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband c 1885. Wikicommons

Behind the loving attention to detail in both The Country Child and the Little House books, lies a sense of regret, even guilt, for a world that both abandoned. Alison Uttley, however much she enjoyed recalling it, did not have had an easy relationship with her childhood home. ‘I had fallen out with Castle Top,’ she writes at one point in her diary, recalling her early married life, ‘I can’t remember why’, and she was jealous of her brother who stayed on the farm, and found him unsympathetic. There was a huge gulf between the farm family and the educated daughter, whether as student, teacher, or housewife, however much they tried to bridge it. Laura Ingalls Wilder felt from an early age an obligation to contribute financially to her parents, and help educate her blind sister, Mary. The Little House books make no secret of the way she sometimes resented the perfect Mary, even if she willingly took on the job of being her “eyes”, and she may have felt relief - and guilt - in escaping these obligations through her early marriage at eighteen.

Laura’s parents, Charles and Caroline Ingalls, whose loss fuelled her writing

Both Uttley and Wilder used the prerogative of fiction to write out their younger brothers from these versions of their lives: Wilder erasing the sadness of an early death; Uttley making herself the centre of her childhood world, and excluding the sibling that she felt her parents valued more. In her diaries, she pictured her own birth at Castle Top, and imagined her parents’ disappointment at discovering she was a girl. A daughter in rural society was inevitably second best to a son who would inherit the farm and help keep his aging parents. Neither did take on the role of caring for parents or siblings: Wilder’s sisters Carrie and Grace cared for Mary in her final years; Uttley’s widowed mother went from family farm to almshouse, and Uttley herself later refused to move in with her widowed brother. Did they see this escape as a source of regret, disloyalty or just an inevitable moving on in life?

Loss, nostalgia, regret, guilt: whatever the wellsprings, the result was work in which the distant details of lost childhood were recreated with meticulous, loving care. For their child readers, these worlds were completely and fascinatingly alien. The Victorian hill farm in the Derbyshire Peak District of the 1880s was gone forever, just as surely as the American West and the Native Americans that Laura had seen leaving their ancestral hunting grounds in the Great Plains a decade before. Perhaps this complex legacy explains a darkness in both books. The feudalism of Castle Top springs out in the cruel and casual arrogance of the Uttley’s squire at church. The failures of the pioneers and their terrible impact upon both the wilderness and its original inhabitants (explored in Caroline Fraser’s marvelous book Prairie Fires) is there in the mass carnage of all those animals caught in Charles Ingalls’ traps, his restlessness, the failure of the family to escape poverty. It’s all there if you look, even if for young readers, the contrast between thrilling danger and comforting home is usually to the fore.

These ambiguous emotions are why some of the more recent criticisms of both writers seem to me unfair. Wilder’s name was removed from the award of the American Library Association because of the values in her books. But the melancholy that enters her writing, as she and her father mourn the disappearing wilderness, reflects an awareness of the other side to the self-sufficient pioneer spirit: as Caroline Fraser makes clear, the pioneers were themselves victims of economic forces beyond their own command, fleeing deprivation in the East, often misled or let down by their government. They inflicted damage, but they also had a love for their surroundings, and aspirations for their families that were fated to be disappointed.

Uttley has been condemned for reshaping her life, and also for how she led it: I will look at these attacks in my next post.

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In the same decade that Uttley first read Wilder, another writer was pondering how to recreate her childhood. Her name was Judith Kerr.

The sequel to Pink Rabbit

 Born in 1923, Kerr, like Wilder and Uttley, spent time teaching before getting married. Like Uttley, she successfully published picture books (including the classic The Tiger Who Came to Tea) but now she now wanted to tell her own story. Only she was struggling to find the right way – the right voice. Then her twelve year old daughter got chicken pox. Kerr later recalled, ‘While she was dozing, I picked up … Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I knew at once – this was it. This was the sort of book I wanted to write.’ 

Like Uttley and Wilder before her, Kerr chose to write about herself in the third person, and like Uttley, she gave her childhood persona a different name: Anna. This allowed her a certain dramatic licence with facts as well as authorial distance from a tumultuous childhood. Although Kerr liked the idea of writing the ‘complete truth’, choosing a fictional form, as opposed to straight memoir, meant that she could write about real people, some of them still alive, with a certain amount of leeway. ‘ . . . they are novels, in the sense they are selective,’ she wrote later, in her memoir Judith Kerr’s Creatures.

Kerr’s childhood was as remarkable as Uttley’s or Wilder’s and her life was also shaped by the Great Depression. But while the Great Depression helped establish their writing careers, it destroyed her father’s. For Alfred Kerr, a successful theatre critic in Berlin, the 1930s were a disaster. When Hitler was swept to power on the tides of Germany’s economic troubles in 1933, Alfred Kerr knew that, as a Jew and critic of the Nazis, his career in Germany was over. He fled the country after being tipped off his name was on a Nazi blacklist; his wife and children followed, and it was that escape and the family’s refugee experience, wandering Europe, that Kerr was to immortalize in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. One of the first children’s books to deal with the topic of Hitler’s Germany and its persecution of the Jews, it was an acceptable introduction because of its spirit of adventure and the familial security that warmed even the most difficult times. In this respect it has much in common with Wilder’s Little House books.

As with Wilder and Uttley, Kerr’s parents had died before she embarked on her book; her father in 1948 and her mother in 1965. Although critics have tried to read parallels with Nazi Germany into The Tiger who Came to Tea, Kerr always denied any link. It was a family trip to see The Sound of Music, and her son’s cheerful comment that now they knew what it had been like for mum, that prompted her to explore the past; and Wilder’s book that provided the model.

Kerr’s third novel

Like Wilder and Uttley, Judith Kerr softened aspects of her childhood. Her son, Matthew Kneale, says she played down the effect of the large age gap (more than 30 years) between her parents, her own love-hate relationship with her brother, and the difficult personality of her mother. In the sequels to Pink Rabbit, Kerr felt able to bring these more to the fore: the third book, A Small Person Far Away, concerns her mother’s attempted suicide when Kerr was a young woman, and makes clear both her mother’s volatility and her favouritism of Kerr’s brother. Perhaps as a result, that book did not achieve the success of Pink Rabbit.

Kerr certainly felt mixed emotions about Pink Rabbit in relation to her departed parents. She later recalled: ‘As the book sold well and was translated … I thought “I am earning money from my parents’ hard times.” And of course the money would have been a godsend to them … But neither my mother or my father lived to see me become an author.’ Her words echo those of Alison Uttley: ‘if my mother and father were alive how I would help them!’ 

Judith Kerr in old age. Christoph Rieger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The books of all three writers have been described as “classics” but it is Wilder and Kerr who are still widely read, while The Country Child and its creator is largely forgotten. Wilder’s books became the basis for the longrunning TV show, The Little House on the Prairie; Kerr’s novel proved a perfect way of introducing a traumatic period to a new generation. I think there are also reasons in the books themselves. Uttley lacks that magical mixture of genuine peril and family security that you find in the Pink Rabbit or Little House books. Whether threatened by wild animals, scarlet fever, crossing a flooded river or getting lost in a prairie blizzard (Wilder); or fleeing a terrifying government and struggling as a war-time refugee through the London Blitz (Kerr), there is still the haven of family love and support. By contrast, in The Country Child the perils are largely in Susan’s head, “goblins [and] fairies” as her mother calls them, but her world seems a more sinister place than the warmly loving families of Wilder and Kerr. 

Having managed to escape her rural origins, Uttley never returned to the countryside, unlike Wilder, who tried to create at Rocky Ridge the independent, resourceful farming homestead that her own parents had aspired to.  In her diaries, Uttley wrote that she much preferred the present to the past. Kerr did create, in postwar London, a life with many similarities to her parents’ before their exile. She married a successful writer, and like her own mother, combined a creative career (her mother was a composer) with raising a boy and a girl, although fortunately the only peril her own children faced in suburban London was the imagined one of a tiger turning up at the door.

No Great Depression?

What would have happened to these three women had there been no Great Depression? Of course, nobody knows. However, it seems likely Ingalls Wilder would still have written Pioneer Girl. Whether she would then have persisted after its rejection, and whether her daughter Rose would have had the same motivation to keep pushing her, without the financial incentives of their lost savings, is another matter.

Uttley started writing before the Depression hit. But would she have persisted, in the face of so many rejections in the 1930s? She would have had dividends to cushion her widowhood, and not experienced the almost desperate sense of needing to support herself, that comes through in her diary.

Judith Kerr’s brother once told her that her life would have been the same if the family had stayed in Germany – she would still have had her nose in a sketch book. Kerr always considered herself primarily an artist. Without the Great Depression – and the Nazi government it brought to power – Kerr would most likely have stayed in Berlin and become a painter: no Pink Rabbit, no Mog or Tiger Who Came to Tea.

The Great Depression was a calamity of the twentieth century. Like an earthquake, it changed the landscape forever. It left Wilder and Uttley gazing back across an abyss, at childhoods that, however hard, were utterly different from those of the 1930s. For their readers there was a charm in those far removed rural lives of “make do and mend” and family solidarity which offered an escape from unemployment lines, soup kitchens and urban unrest. For Judith Kerr’s family, the Great Depression forced them from a life of comfort and opportunity to one where – in some ways like the Ingalls in their pioneer wagon – they was reduced to dependence upon their small, nomadic, family unit, doing their best to keep a different kind of wolf from the door. 

All three helped create a new kind of fiction. Other children’s writers had mined their own childhoods for material  – Alcott’s Little Women being a classic example – but Wilder, Uttley and Kerr deliberately set out to recreate a vanished time. Historical events had conspired to take them far from the worlds in which they had been born; the loss of their parents broke their last links to those lost worlds. In the hard scrabble 1930s, Wilder and Uttley pioneered a new kind of literature; decades later, Kerr recreated her 1930s childhood by following in their literary footsteps. In all three cases, they brought the past to life.

Sources:

Little House In the Big Woods (1931) by Laura Ingalls Wilder

By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939) by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2017) by Caroline Fraser

The Country Child (1930) by Alison Uttley

The Diaries of Alison Uttley (2011) edited by Denis Judd

Alison Uttley, Spinner of Tales (2010) by Denis Judd

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) by Judith Kerr

Judith Kerr’s Creatures (2013) by Judith Kerr

The Truth about Judith Kerr, My Mother by Matthew Kneale in The Times 

In my next posts I will look at the character assassination of Alison Uttley.